Tara Freeman's Application to College
by Penelope Lane Jr
Summary: This is a short view of a character named Tara's essay to an art college. The essay shows a short snapshot into her life as she struggled to come of age but eventually did through art. This is an original work.


_Hey guys! I just wrote this in class one day. Basically we had to write in the perspective of someone struggling to grow up, or come-of-age. This is me writing in the perspective of a young woman as she writes a letter of her struggling to an art college. Please don't judge too harshly. I hope you like it! _

**Name: **Tara Freeman

**Major:** Interior Design

**Essay:**

Why I should be Admitted into the Rhode Island School of Design; Friends

Why should I, Tara Freeman, a fresh of the block highschool graduate be admitted into such a fine institution as the Rhode Island School of Design you might be wondering? Well, I'm afraid the only way I can fully answer that question is by asking another question. What are friends? I've been asking myself that question for the past year. I've come to several conclusions. One, a friend is someone similar to yourself. They react to situations similarly to how you would, and thus you two are attracted to each other's familiarity. You become friends. Two, a friend is someone who is completely different from you. Think of a Miley and Lily type of friendship, you two are so different that you are intrigued by how different the other is. Therefore, you find a similarity in the intrigue of the other's differences. Hope I'm not confusing you too much here. And finally, three, a friend is someone who understands what you're going through, but doesn't necessarily agree with you. They listen to you, but don't always agree with how you handle situations. They aren't afraid to challenge your motives and push you to become better. I used to want the third type.

I've spent the last year questioning my life, my choices, and especially my friends. Were my friends really my "friends"? Or were they simply pleasant shadows in my life? They laughed with me and went to Starbucks with me, but by the end of the year I had realized that I was exactly the same as I was in the beginning. No, I thought, this isn't right; I'm supposed to be different? Each year is supposed to help me mature, why was I the same? Then it hit me, I hadn't been pushed. I felt equivalent to a hardcore wrestler who had been training his whole life and then just decided to take a year's break, right when he had been closest to his goal. I pulled out the memory of me sitting happily at Dunkin' Donuts, talking about light hearted things like the weather, with everyone smiling around the table because this was an appropriate subject topic. I could almost smell the superficiality steaming off of my hot coffee cup. Schmuck. My inside voice yelled at me. You're a complete schmuck, these aren't your real friends. My imaginary little version of myself got up and threw the coffee cup at the cashier. No more, I thought, no more. That night, I lay awake in bed, memories kept flooding me of how I'd wasted the school year. Emotions were drowning me, STOP! But they wouldn't. I slung my arm over the bed in angst and grabbed the thing nearest to me, a worn out pencil randomly sitting on my bedside table. My hand took on a life of its own as it dragged the rest of my body out of bed and across the room to my desk. Swirling brunette curls clouded my vision, but 9 years in the same room had made me aware of where every piece of my belongings were. After finding a scrap of old paper, my hand start moving in shapes I could only imagine because of the room's darkness. Eventually, my emotions were all on paper and I felt contempt. Somehow, I mustered back into my bed and dozed off. I woke up the next morning only to find myself staring at the scrap of paper I had scribbled on before. Intricate details lay on portraits of people I had never seen before, from the depth's of my imagination. Shapes and everyday objects had been sketched on the paper. It was almost beautiful. An ocean of emotion cropped to fit a 5 by 5 piece of scrap paper. It was then that I realized what my calling in life was. I was going to be an artist.

Everything fell into place after that. I joined Art club, what my previous "friends" would have deemed 'lame'. I met other souls like mine and soon we were intertwined in our quest for a beautiful world. Colors surrounded me every step in the art room. Whether I was at the pottery wheel or with an oil paintbrush in hand working on still life, it didn't matter. But another thing I realized was that friends didn't have to be people. Friends could be anything. All that mattered was that they helped you or meant something to you. I had found my "third type of friend," but not as how I would have expected. Art. Art, accepted me for who I was, it offered me a shoulder to cry on and express my feelings, but at the same time motivated me to do better, to draw or create whatever it was I wanted to create better. To use more shade, or better proportion to make my emotions become as realistic on paper as they were in my mind. And at the same time, the more realistic they became on paper, the less large they became in my head. Art took the rotten feelings that had been so common for me and got rid of them. That's all I could have ever hoped for in a friend.


End file.
